Wednesday, September 28, 2011

Edward de Vere and the Revenge of the Laureate Poets


"What greater and more odious infamye, for one of my standinge in the Universitye and profession abroade', writes Gabriel Harvey to Edmund Spenser toward the end of the sixteenth century, than to be classed amongst 'Inglish Rimers?' -- from Andrew Bennett, _The Author_

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...howsoeuer the mistaking worlde takes it (whose left hand euer receyu'd what I gaue with my Right.) --George Chapman, to Inigo Jones

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I'd  like to bring to the reader's attention to Richard Helgerson's description of a group of poets he terms 'self-crowned laureates', and attach this concept to the authorship question as a framework for understanding the motivations of certain poets who assisted in the destruction of the literary fame of the Earl of Oxford. Helgerson discusses three poets in particular - Spenser, Jonson and Milton: all three of these have appeared in the pages of this blog as poets who criticized Shakespeare/Oxford either explicitly or by adopting the classical method of critiquing a powerful man under the cover of figured language (e.g. Quintilian Institutio oratoria 9.2.66/Demetrius _On Style_). Among this number I would also include Gabriel Harvey, George Chapman and Sir Philip Sidney as poets of the ethical 'laureate' type who opposed themselves to the popular poet Shakespeare. (I'll include Sidney among this number since he was born a gentleman, not a nobleman).

Jonson, Timber


...BUT WHY DO men depart at all from the RIGHT and NATURAL WAYS of speaking? sometimes for necessity, when we are driven, or think it fitter, to speak that in obscure words, or by circumstance, which uttered plainly would offend the hearers. Or to avoid obsceneness, or sometimes for pleasure, and variety, as travellers turn out of the highway, drawn either by the commodity of a footpath, or the delicacy or freshness of the fields. And all this is called åó÷çìáôéóìåíç (eschematismene) or FIGURED LANGUAGE.

compare:

Jonson - Timber


{Topic 67}} {{Subject: AFFECTED language}}

De vere argutis. - I do hear them say often some men are not witty, because they are not everywhere witty; than which nothing is more foolish. If an eye or a nose be an excellent part in the face, therefore be all eye or nose! I think the eyebrow, the forehead, the cheek, chin, lip, or any part else are as necessary and natural in the place. But now nothing is good that is natural; RIGHT and NATURAL LANGUAGE seems to have least of the wit in it; that which is writhed and tortured is counted the more exquisite. Cloth of bodkin or tissue must be embroidered; as if no face were fair that were not powdered or painted! no beauty to be had but in wresting and writhing our own tongue! Nothing is fashionable till it be DEFORMED; and this is to write like a gentleman. All must be affected and preposterous as our gallants' clothes, sweet-bags, and night-dressings, in which you would think our men lay in, like LADIES, it is so curious.



For a discussion of how 'laureate' poets (such as Jonson- above) differed from courtly amateurs such as Edward de Vere:

Anne Ferry - Review of Helgerson's 'Self-Crowned Laureates':

'...The history begins with an account of late sixteenth-century society in which Spenser and Jonson struggled to define themselves as laureates by distinguishing themselves, in ways often perilous, from both poetic amateurs and a new generation of professionals. The discussion of Spenser stresses how he did so by assimilating the conventions of the amateur lover-poets to new and high purposes, while Jonson is shown to stake out his claim by working in relatively untried poetic modes, especially satire, epigram, and comedy. The discussion of Milton is as convincing but more surprising. It argues that his work is marked by the historical situation he shared with the generation of Caroline poets, when the decline in literary autonomy was accompanied by the dimming of distinctions among amateur, professional, and laureate poets, distinctions which had given Spenser and Jonson opportunities for self-definition as laureates.


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The Author by Andrew Bennett

It is...those poets of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries that challenged the 'stigma' of print, who embraced, in their own ways, authorship as a profession, that may be said to have succeeded in positioning themselves at the centre of the English literary canon. There seems to be something of an uncanny literary-historical logic in such canonization, one that was to be developed and embraced into a fully-fledged 'culture of posterity' in the eighteenth century and the Romantic period: poets are memorialized in the future just to the extent that they escape the prejudices of their own time and embrace what will become the standards of posterity.

(snip)

(note - it is clear that Edward de Vere's reputation did not escape the prejudices of his own time. By publishing his long poems under a pseudonym and by making no apparent effort to assemble his 'stained' works into the form of a literary monument - his memorialization remained at the mercy of the laureate poets. Poetry written by a courtly amateur had very different aims than poetry written by professional 'laureate' poets. Oxford was memorialized according to the tastes and standards of the professional poets - who used their poetic authority to grant him an 'unworthy' anti-laureate fame (Shakespeare of Stratford) that still stands as a learned correction to Shakespeare/Oxford's popularity among the unlearned vulgar. In order to increase the importance of their own projects, they had to diminish the sprezzatura and success of Oxford's 'amateur' productions. To challenge the authority of the Earl they drew on classical criticism to prove that Oxford's 'popular' writings were beneath his dignity, and that he had compromised his integrity/honesty by producing scurrilous, obscene and irregular works that were of questionable ethical and aesthetic value.

Ironically, though Oxford's reputation did not escape 'the prejudices of his own time', his orphaned Book continues to influence the 'culture and standards of posterity' and still overshadows the legacy of the laureates! When Chapman describes his own distorted exchanges with the 'mistaking worlde, whose left hand euer receyu'd what I gaue with my Right', he encapsulates the unenviable plight of the laureate poet. And when it comes to the identity of Shakespeare the gawping world, always assuming it receives Right what was given Right - STILL reaches wide with both Left hands.)




Andrew Bennett, con't.
Richard Helgerson examines the emergence of this logic of canonization in a study of the literary 'system' out of which Spenser, Jonson and Milton emerged, Self-Crowned Laureates (1983). Helgerson distinguishes between the courtly 'amateurs' of the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries and those 'professionals' that he calls 'laureate poets'. 'Laureate' poets are those whose writing was itself 'a means of making a contribution to the order and improvement of the state' (Helgerson 1983:29), poets whose ambition resided in poetry alone and who embraced print technology and the potential fame and wealth it could bring. As seems to have been the case with Chaucer, Helgerson's three laureate poets, Spenser, Jonson and Milton, were all concerned with their own status and role as poets, with themselves as authors. Spenser, Helgerson comments, was 'unique' amongst his contemporaries, since he alone 'presented himself as a poet, as a man who considered writing a duty rather than a distraction', and was England's first 'professed, if not fully professional, poet' (pp.55,82). Jonson's 'work was himself', Helgerson comments, 'and he could not avoid saying so': 'No other English Renaissance poet so intrudes on his work', and he insists on 'his laureate self-presentation' to such an extent that 'sometimes the poet overwhelms the poem' (pp. 182, 183, 103). And Milton 'transcend[s] the difficulties inherent in his temporal location', his 'grandly imposing solitariness' itself figuring amongst 'the most persistent and most powerful signs of [his] laureate transcendance' (pp231,235). If Helgerson is right, the origin of the modern or Romantic sense of authorship in the English canon involves a self-conscious insistence on the poet him- or herself as poet, and idea that confirms Lawrence Lipking's more general, and more historically unspecific, idea that poets become poets precisely by meditating on what it means to be a poet: 'Every major Western poet after Homer', comments Lipking, 'has left some work that records the principles of his own poetic development' (Lipking 1981:viii). What ultimately marks out Hlegerson's 'laureate' poets is precisely that they they embrace print culture and thereby self-consciously mark themselves out, that they therefore constitute individual voices and personalities, that they make themselves into authors in a sense that can only be fully appreciated after their death. (pp. 47-49)

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The Earl of Oxford belonged to the class of poets Helgerson calls 'amateurs':
'.. amateurs...who wrote for members of their own coteries rather than for publication or the stage. For them, poetry is a mark of social distinction, a pleasurable indulgence, and the medium of transactions with lovers, friends, and patrons.' 'Trial by Theater', Matthew Greenfield

The aristocratic amateur is distinct from the laureate type - for the laureate, poetry is an 'ethical instrument' and their poetry is designed to instruct as well as delight.


As Oxford pursued his own ends in writing his poetry and plays he began to draw negative attention from laureate poets who sought to 'purify' poetry and make it respectable for their own uses. These laureates drew on classical sources to support their view that the true purpose of poetry was essentially ethical.


Oxfordian/Shakespearean deformations were not the only things that were attacked - Oxford's own character came under fire. The 'unwoorthy objects' and unclassical 'monsters' his mind produced were interpreted as signs of a deformed and unworthy mind - as the laureates began to question not only the moral integrity of Oxford but the nature of his right to hold high place. For some laureates, 'unworthy Shakespeare' and 'ignoble Oxford' raised the question of true and false nobility (vera nobilitas) - as they opposed nobility based on merit and virtue to the accidental nobility of blood.

Concerned with constructing their own fame and controlling how posterity would view their productions - the laureate poets were perfectly equipped to memorialize Oxford as the clown/scurra Shakespeare after Oxford relinquished authorial control of his book. Oxford/Shakespeare's style and popularity had diminished the potential glory available to the scholars, and the fashionable nature of Shakespearean works set the tone and made 'laureate' endeavors less desirable and economically viable. These social and economic pressures incited the hostility of the laureates, who became even more careful to distinguish between Shakespeare's undiscerning and ignorant audience, and the intellectually elite audience that could 'understand' and judge their precise and studied productions. They marked out a distinct boundary between Shakespeare's work and their own - all the while attempting to educate an 'ignorant' public in the differences between their own 'right' and judicious poems and plays and Shakespeare's barbarous deformations of order and form.

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To the Most generally ingenious, and our only Learned Architect, my exceeding good Friend INYGO IONES, Esquire; Surueigher of His Maiesties Workes.


ANcient Poesie, and ancient Architecture, requiring to their excellence a like creating and proportionable Rapture, and being alike ouer-topt by the monstrous Babels of our Moderne Barbarisme; Their vniust obscurity, letting no glance of their trueth and dignity appear, but to passing few: To passing few is their lest apparance to be presented. Your selfe then being a Chiefe of that View few, by whom Both are apprehended; & their beames worthily measur'd and valew'd. This little Light of the one, I could not but obiect, and publish to your choise apprehension; especially for your most ingenuous Loue to all Workes, in which the ancient Greeke Soules haue appear'd to you. No lesse esteeming this, woorth the presenting to any Greatest, for the smalnes of the woke; then the Authour himselfe hath beene helde therfore of the lesse estimation: huing obtain'das much preseruation and honor, as the greatest of Others: the Smalnesse beeing supplyed with so greatly-excllent Inuention and Elocution. Nor lacks euen the most youngly-enamor'd affection it cotaines, a Temper graue enough, to become, both the Sight and Acceptance of the Grauest. And therefore, howsoeuer the mistaking worlde takes it (whose left hand euer receyu'd what I gaue with my Right.) If you freely and nobly entertaine it, I obtaine my End: your Iudicious Loues continuance, being my onely Obiect: To which I at all partes commend.

Your Ancient poore Friend George Chapman.

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vera nobilitas/virtues of the mind
noble/noscere/to know, judge

Chapman, A Coronet For his Mistress Philosophy (1595)
(snip)

IX.
For words want art, and Art wants words to praise her [Philosophy] ;
Yet shall my active and industrious pen
Wind his sharp forehead through those parts that raise her,
And register her worth past rarest women.
Herself shall be my Muse ; that well will know
Her proper inspirations ; and assuage
With her dear love the wrongs my fortunes show,
Which to ray youth bind heartless grief in age.
Herself shall be my comfort and my riches,
And all my thoughts I will on her convert ;
Honour, and error, which the world bewitches,
Shall still crown fools, and tread upon desert,
And never shall my friendless verse envy
Muses that Fame's loose feathers beautify.

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Benjamin - Son of my Right hand

Droeshout Engraving - two left arms/two left hands